Twitter Readies for Transparency Fight Despite NSA Deal

For Twitter, the deal tech companies and the U.S government reached that allows for more transparency on NSA data requests just isn't enough.

The company published a new transparency report on Thursday and took advantage of the chance to push for more transparency and criticize the deal reached last week by the U.S. Department of Justice and Google, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn and Microsoft, all of which filed motions for more transparency in the past few months.

The agreement was reached after months of news reports on NSA surveillance fueled by documents leaked by Edward Snowden. According to the terms of the agreement, companies are now allowed to publish the number of national security related requests (such as National Security Letters or FISA Court orders) they have received — but only in ranges, and with a few other restrictions.

"While this agreement is a step in the right direction, these ranges do not provide meaningful or sufficient transparency for the public," Jeremy Kessel, Twitter's global policy manager, wrote in a blog post. "Allowing Twitter, or any other similarly situated company, to only disclose national security requests within an overly broad range seriously undermines the objective of transparency."

Twitter's main beef with the restrictions is that for companies like itself, which receive only a handful of requests, the agreed range doesn't provide "sufficient" or "meaningful" precision.

Kessel insists that the company needs more transparency and is ready to fight for it. That's why Twitter is still pushing the Department of Justice for looser restrictions on transparency and is even "considering legal options" to defend its First Amendment rights, Kessel wrote.

In the transparency report, Twitter noted an increase both in requests for user data as well as in requests to remove content, which companies like Google also noted in a previous report.

Twitter received only 849 requests for user data in the first half of 2012, but in the last six months of 2013, that number has risen to 1,410. The vast majority, 833, came from the United States government, and Twitter complied with 69% of those. The second and third countries in terms of user data requests were Japan, with 213, and Saudi Arabia, with 110.

The removal requests chart, above, shows an even sharper spike. In this case, the increase is almost entirely due to requests from the French government. France leads all other countries in data removal requests by a wide margin with 306 in the last six months of 2013 (the second country is Russia with 14).

In the last two years, the European country has been very active in fighting anti-semitism on Twitter, asking for Tweets to be taken down, as well as ordering the company to identify racist users.

After a long legal battle, Twitter had to comply with the order to identify the authors of a series of anti-semitic tweets in July of last year.

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